Wednesday, June 24, 2009

"Post No. 645"

Well...ya never know just what you'll find in ones' garden. While I was pulling up weeds from around one plant close to the edge of the house (where the rain had washed away some of the soil) I found THIS pretty little "bird point" arrowhead. Hard to say what tribe it could have come from since there were so very many which both hunted and battled here in Kentucky. In fact, this point may never have even been used as you'll notice a bottom left piece is gone which could have been done by the person who made it and then discarded it as flawed. Let's just hope that my house doesn't sit on top of Indian burials as there's hard evidence of early settler's burials in my backyard as well and I have enough problems with poltergeist here as it is.

And, remember those two older humor comics I won back at the end of last month? One of them finally arrived, the Harvey Hits #7 (Harvey Comics/1959/1st.solo comic devoted to "Wendy the Good Little Witch") and I scanned it and downloaded it to the Comic Data Base. So that particular issue (which you can see HERE is my personal comic from my collection (Neat!)

And this is one of my rare day's off from work. At least now we do have some extra part-time help so just maybe I can finally have TWO days off in a row for a change. I've already been busy trying to play "catch up" with everything needed doing since I had my last day off, such as grocery shopping for my mom, weeding her flower bed, fixing a leak in her roof, trimming back some tree branches, and trying to straighten up all of the stuff my wife and I crammed into her basement in anticipation for an upcoming yard sale. (While I was moving boxes around in the basement I pulled a short box of comics from those I have for sale in the yard sale that I decided to keep, but probably won't even add them back to my inventory list or bother to bag/board them.)

My good friend Steve brought me a full set of the 1960's Charlton title, The Fightin' 5 which I've been reading back through for the first time in probably 40 years. I bought that title regularly off the stands back there and recall trading with fellow collectors for issues, as well as buying some of them for a nickle each at my Aunt Katy's old grocery in this town. Charlton was always the #3 group after Marvel and DC for me, and I bought a lot of their stuff; not just the super-hero titles, but their monster and humor and fantasy/sf comics, and some of the war and westerns, too. Hercules was always one of my favorite Charlton titles, and not really anything that would fit into any of the above catagories (same holds true for another fave, Jungle Tales of Tarzan). The company certainly had a lot of variety. Most collectors probably remember the F5 due to "The Peacemaker" being in a couple of issues, but one thing that distinguished it a bit from others was, as far as I can recall, the only TEAM title they produced.

Read some of the stack of modern type comics I've gotten in of late. Most impressive was the storyline in DC's The Flash V2 #'s 198-200, where a new version of his old enemy the reverse Flash (aka: "Zoom") almost kills Wally's wife and it takes both the Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick, Impulse, and the current version of "Johnny Quick" to help bring down this villian. In the meantime, the Silver-Age Flash, Barry Allen, appears to Wally via his time traveling treadmill and brings along the Hal Jordon/Green Lantern version of "The Spectre", which grants Wally's wish to make everyone forget who The Flash's secret I.D. had been, giving him back some sort of safer more normal life.

Also now read were issues of DC's All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder #'s 2 & 3 where Frank Miller tries to rewrite the Bats' history. Miller disapoints me these days with little over-played scenereos but no real meat to his stories, and even the artwork of Jim Lee (who at times I can appreciate), doesn't do much to help this book.

Eternals #1 of the 6 issue L.S. from 2006 was well-written by Neil Gaiman, and John Rominta Jr.'s artwork was very good. It finally fell back into the hands of someone who was familiar with Jack Kirby's themes (even if The Eternals was just a second-hand version of his "New Gods").

DC's Day of Vengence L.S. 1-3 played very well with some second-stringer-type heroes such as Detective Chimp, The Enchantress, Nightmaster, Blue Devil and Ragman trying to halt The Spectre's current rampage of wanting to destroy all the magic in the world. Spectre was without a human host to ground him, and let a version of Eclipso curb his thinking a bit too much and "The Hand of God" kills many of those with magical powers, leading this team on the quest.

Several issues of V1 of Wildstorm's The Authority were also read, and it's hard to give any issue of this first series anything but good reviews. The Authority , to me, is one of those near perfect team titles.

Read an issue of the Marvel Boy L.S. from Marvel and was not in the least impressed, but was very impressed with the copy of Marvel's Moon Knight #1 (from 2006) with an excellant line up of people working on it such as Huston & Finch.

Sorry there's no deep in depth reviews about any of that; just my personal yeas & nays. (Just too tired this time.)